NnoVVember

In late August, I posted a piece about the LEGO September Build Challenge (SHIPtember).  While I was doing that, my plan was to post about NnoVVember in late October, but the blog schedule for late October filled up with what I felt were necessary topics pretty fast. 

Then the early November schedule also started to get away from me, and the NnoVVember post got pushed to November 6^th and then finally to today, November 9^th.

So while I definitely would have liked to have discussed the event before it began for those who might become interested in participating in it, I also recognized that doing so wasn’t as important as it was for SHIPtember which was a far more time intensive challenge than NnoVVember is. 

But if you’re unfamiliar with all of this, you’ve probably got some questions. Let’s see if I can answer a few of them.

What Is NnoVVember?

NnoVVember is the main November LEGO build challenge.  (I don’t know if there are other established annual build challenges in November or not. If there are, they aren’t big enough for me to have noticed them over the giant that is NnoVVember.) 

NnoVVember is fairly simple. To participate, simply build a Vic Viper. Then post a photo of it in the appropriate thread in the Vic Viper forum on Flickr (or possibly now on the Discord server – not certain about that). That’s it. That’s NnoVVember.

Want to build more than one Vic Viper? Go for it. A small fleet of them? Sure, why not. Build as many (or as few) Vic Vipers as you want.

What Is a Vic Viper?

The Vic Viper was a spacecraft that appeared in the Gradius series of video games.

What?

Oh, I see. You think that this is where I’m going to talk about the Gradius games. Yeah, well, I’m not doing that. Because the only two things that I know about the Gradius games are that A.) the series started sometime in the 80s; and, B.) those games are where the Vic Viper comes from.

And that’s it. That is the sum total of my knowledge about Gradius. Yes, I could write up a couple of paragraphs for you with more detailed information, but that info would all be coming straight from Wikipedia in this instance. And there’s no need for me to read it and then recompose it into text for here in the post when I can just send you guys over to Wikipedia to read it yourself. (Sorry. I’m being lazy this post.)

Okay, now that the Gradius stuff is out of the way…back to defining the Vic Viper. 

A Vic Viper (both in video game lore and as a LEGO MOC) is a single pilot starfighter with three specific design elements. The first of these is the set of dual prongs at the front of the ship. The second is a pair of lateral wings toward the back of the ship. And the third is a single dorsal tail.

(Yeah, I know those weren’t in the same order as the infographic below. I didn’t look at the picture before writing that paragraph, and the order I put them is the order that I usually add them to the virtual ship in my head as I’m conceptually building it.)

There is also an optional fourth design element that apparently almost made it into the semi-official LEGO ‘rules’ for building Vic Vipers, and that is a pair of underwing missile pods. Some people add them, others don’t. I never intentionally added them, because my last Vic Viper was built prior to even learning about them. But looking back at pictures of my old Vic Vipers, I notice things that could easily be considered underwing missile pods that I included on a build or two despite not knowing that they were supposed to even be a thing.

How Did This All Start?

The origins of NnoVVember go back to some point before November 2008, when skilled and prolific MOC-builder Nate Nielson (more commonly known to the AFOL community as nnenn) co-created a Vic Viper group on Flickr with Peter Morris (who as far as I know has no nom du brick).

Both men built several Vic Vipers and uploaded pictures of them to the group.  But then the group just sat there, basically stagnant. In October of 2008 nnenn decided that he was going to undertake a personal build challenge… building 30 Vic Vipers, posting one of them a day to the group throughout November.

Calling this new challenge Novvember, he and Peter publicly invited other builders to take part. Not necessarily to build a Vic Viper a day as was nnenn’s personal goal, but to build even just one during the month. Nnenn had expected a small handful of builders would take up the challenge at the beginning, with a few more trickling in as the month went on. But the event was far more successful than that. I tried to get stats on how many builders and how many ships total, but my good close personal friend the Internet was apparently in a mood, and being no help to me at all.

Novvember was apparently not intended to be an annual event, but partway into the following year, people started talking to the pair, asking questions about ‘that year’s Novvember’. And thus, it was suddenly an annual event.

Where Did That Extra ‘N’ Come From?

In April of 2010, nnenn tragically died in a car accident.

Vic Viper memorial fly-ins were organized at all of the major LEGO conventions that year. The ships were arranged in the missing man formation, traditionally used to honor the memory of a fallen pilot, with a gap where that pilot’s ship should have been.

Come November, the 3^rd annual Vic Viper build challenge was rebranded NnoVVember, in honor of nnenn. It has retained that spelling and capitalization ever since. 

What Is The Map?

Once each year’s NnoVVember comes to a close, all of the official ships (those Vic Vipers that followed the build rules and got posted in the official thread on Flickr), work begins on the map.

All of the Vic Viper images are cleaned up and moved onto a humungous single poster-like image that eventually contains the entire fleet of that year’s NnoVVember starfighters. This is called the map.

My History With NnoVVember (and Vic Vipers in General)

I built my first Vic Viper for NnoVVember 2013. I built it, photographed it, and posted it in the Vic Viper forum on Flickr. But not knowing that it had to be posted specifically in the NnoVVember thread, it didn’t count, and was not included on that year’s map. (And as that was the only year that I built a Vic Viper during NnoVVember, my work has yet to appear on one of the maps.)

It came together for me over the course of a couple of days. When I started building it, I only knew that I wanted to use a lot of dark purple 1x2 tiles (which I had gotten from the local LEGO store’s Pick-a-Brick Wall), and that I wanted to build in a number of 2x2 plates with a wheel holder on opposite sides with only one of those wheel holders exposed. My plan was to then attach a wheel to the each of the exposed wheel holders to represent thrusters.

I started digging through my assortment of parts, looking for likely Vic Viper components. (I had a lot fewer parts to dig through back in 2013.) I settled on using a pile of light and dark bley pieces for the bulk of the ship. With two shades of bley and the purple as the primary colors, it also had black (almost completely hidden) as the base of the wings, and the occasional spot of trans-red as a highlight.

I’d thought of a name for the Vic Viper – Deep Aster – but it was still missing one important thing. A pilot. So, I went and started putting together a minifig that looked like a competent enough pilot to fly my new Vic Viper.

Once it was finished, I looked at it and said to myself, “This looks really good!” (If you’re wondering how I said it, it was with great surprise. I’m not used to having the things I build look that good.)  I was very proud of that ship. Looking at photos of it now, I’m still proud of it.

Anyway, as I said, I submitted it for NnoVVember. Then later on used my photos of it for another thing (which I’ll get to in a minute). And then it sat on my build table for awhile. But then, one day…

One day an impulse seized me, and I thought, “I should take that apart so that I can reuse it’s parts in other MOCs.” 

That was a day when I desperately needed my traditional procrastination, and my procrastination failed me completely. Because almost immediately after having the thought to disassemble it… I disassembled it. 

And then, into the tote of LEGO parts it all went. I didn’t think about it after that. Not for a long while. But when I did finally think about it, that thought was, “I really wish that I hadn’t taken that apart.”

The reason that I took it apart was so that its parts would be available for me to reuse. Have I, in the following nine years, actually reused any of those parts? No. No I have not.  Is the destruction of Deep Aster one of the higher placed items on my list of LEGO-based regrets? Yes. Yes it is.

From One Month Out of the Year to One Day a Week

A month or so after building Deep Aster, I started doing a LEGO blog. It was incredibly short lived. But before I realized how short lived it would be, I had decided that it would have some recurring ‘theme’ days.

Having recently built (and enjoyed building) Deep Aster for NnoVVember, I decided that I would start building more Vic Vipers, and posting them in the new blog on Vic Viper Vednesday.

What I didn’t realize at the time (and wouldn’t figure out for a while) is that I apparently only had a certain amount of Vic Viper building talent in me, and I used it all building Deep Aster. Out of all of the Vic Vipers I would go on to build (and there were something like a dozen of them), I didn’t look at any of the completed ships with the pride that I felt after having built that first one.

Looking back at photos of those Vic Vipers now, most of them fill me instead with a sense of, “What the Hell was I thinking?” 

Since my blog launched in January, I decided that the first ship for Vic Viper Vednesday would be New Year’s themed.  So I build New Year’s Evve, included four bricks from the LEGO brick-built calendar, and put both Father Time and Baby New Year in the cockpit. That ship didn’t turn out horrible, but it looks far too clunky to me.

For the second week, I used my pride and joy, Deep Aster. Week three’s ship wasn’t as bad as those to come, but still wasn’t great. The backstory: It was an unnamed prototype starfighter built by the aliens from the Alien Conquest theme, and based on a Alien Defense Unit Vic Viper that they had captured and reverse engineered.

Week four is where I started to go off the rails. The Love Machine was a Vic Viper built by the Roman god Vulcan for the use of his stepson Cupid. Heart-shaped Vic Viper with arrows for the forward prongs. And a completely inadequate dorsal tail.

Week five. Yeah, I just can’t defend myself as a MOC builder regarding week five’s entry. Because in week five I built a log cabin themed Vic Viper to be piloted by Abe Lincoln.

Week six I built an unmanned drone Vic Viper. Which I still think was a viable concept, it just ended up being uglier than I had hoped. 

Week seven fell on the same week as that year’s Bricks Cascade in Portland, Oregon (also known as the City of Roses). I used that as an excuse to build a convention-themed Vic Viper called the Cascade Rose.

Week eight, much like week five, is a Vic Viper that I don’t understand why I thought was a passable MOC. The Ugly Peacock. The design of the splayed wings was weird enough, but the complete randomization of their colors? Absolutely baffling to me now.

Week nine (and the final installment of Vic Viper Vednesday from the first of my two LEGO blogs) belonged to a ship called the Old Bley Mare.  Completely two-tone blueish-grey. Not as bad as some of the others, but… still not good.

There was no week ten for that blog. But Vic Viper Vednesday would pick up again about a year later in the second version of my LEGO blog, and that era kicked off with the Cup-o’-Joe. Built in-and-around a third party LEGO compatible coffee cup, and piloted by Larry the Barista.

Then came the Seventh Power. I actually kind of like this one. It’s probably my second favorite, after Deep Aster. In fact, I still have it in its assembled form in the LEGO room.

Guardsman 9 was another case of a good idea with a so-so actual build. I still like the concept of the hinged cockpit module that can rise up to face the direction that the Vic Viper itself is facing, or alternately lower itself down into the profile of the ship.

And the last Vic Viper I ever built came about because of some white technic panels with POLICE stickers that I got in a bulk lot. I took one look at them and knew that I was going to build a Vic Viper for Jake and Elwood Blues…the Blues Brothers.

Hopefully this post has been informative for you regarding NnoVVember and Vic Vipers in general. I’m going to go now. Not to build a Vic Viper for NnoVVember, though, as I’m kind of scared of what kind of horrible monstrosity I might accidentally put together.